Posted
by
CowboyNeal
on Friday September 28, 2007 @06:47AM
from the like-computer-science-and-astronomy dept.

Science_afficionado writes "A new study has found that cockroaches are morons in the morning and geniuses in the evening in terms of their learning capacity. Previous studies suggest that the learning capacity of both people and rats are also affected by their internal biological clocks. But the effect is far more dramatic in cockroaches and it is the first time it has been found in insects. And, no, the researchers didn't try giving their cockroaches a sip of coffee to see if it revived them!"

Would they learn better if installed in groups? In cubicles?
Are there pointy-haired cockroaches?
Did the researchers give them 20% of their time to work on personal projects?
come one, where's the research!

Sorry to disappoint you, but that sentence is neither aggressive nor dirty (except grammatically). Muttersprachler just means native speaker, and there are absolutely no negative connotations involved.

As for being the best language for cursing: keep thinking that way if it helps you picking up a second language. Honestly. I thought the same way about Japanese and it motivated me to learn it, only to understand that cursing makes you sound like an imbecile, like in any other language. It just doesn't matter

Oh, I agree that cursing makes you sound like an imbecile. Well, most of the time. I actually quite enjoy and admire an inventive curser; it demonstrates facility with a language as well as imagination and creativity.

I actually had more in mind of German being the best language to curse at non-German speaking people. Maybe it is just me, but it is a harsh sounding language, which lends itself well to cursing. And for some reason, I like the idea of cursing people in a language they don't understand.

Before you mod a post as flamebait for having an obscene sounding word like Muttersprachler, take three seconds and use Google translate [google.com]. He just used German to indicate that the person with the grammatical error seemed to be a native German speaker. Whomever modded that post as flamebait was a Wienersnitzel.

HAH!! I doubt you could even get a cockroach to stoop so low as to working for our Uncle Sammy in DC!! Cockroaches have higher standards!

Silly govt. departments...

Whatever. Not sure why civil servants get such a bad rap. Next time your you send a letter across the country for less than a dollar, read an SEC filing, fly in an airplane, drive on a highway, eat meat or produce without food poisoning, surf the internet, use GPS, drink TANG, etc...; thank a civil servant.

The study was supported by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health.

Presumably they're interested in the effect of the circadian system on memory aquisition and retrival, which is certainly worth studying and probably simailar in all animals, and its far easier to do initial work on insects and then scale it up to mammals.

There might also be direct benefits to understanding cockroach behaviour, since they are a major public health risk in some parts of the world.

So, what would you do with liquid on the ground where you are? Drink it? Urine is not that dangerous either generally, at least not compared to just about any other bodily excretion, and loads of other things that aren't. And anyway, go out in London in the evening and you'll get the same effect... I'm doing that tomorrow - I'll be sure to note that it's just like being in Manila when I step over a puddle of piss.

I'm not an expert but I know they spread diseases and cause food poisoning, mostly due to their fondness for eating rotting food and crawling through excrement. According to a quick Google search they also seem to produce a lot of allergens.

They also seem to assume there are no other factors involved. Maybe it's not 'ability' to learn but 'desire' instead. Maybe their digestive system doesn't normally work at that time of day, and there's not enough incentive to learn. There's probably a billion other reasons they haven't thought of, right down to which researchers worked with which groups, and what other smells were nearby at each time, etc. I'm sure they tried to rule out all outside influence, but it's impossible to do so completely.

I'd also like to remind everyone that a finding doesn't have any weight until it's been independently verified by a couple other labs.

I don't think a cockroach has enough theory of mind to 'desire' to learn. And in any case there's no practical difference between desire to learn and ability to learn if predicting cockroach behaviour is the outcome. Either it will learn or it wont.

With respect to other influences, I'm sure a journal like PNAS wouldn't take the research if it had fatal flaws. They're quite fussy.

Also, I don't see why a study needs to be replicated before it has any weight. Unless you think there are significant flaws

You think that's a stupid bug, I've actually seen an insect try to commit suicide and fail.

Last week, I saw a huge butterfly try to kill itself by attempting to become entangled in the web of a much smaller spider. It was like watching someone trying to commit suicide by driving a Mack truck through a mobile home. Luckily, the spider managed to escape the flailing butterfly, but the web did not have a good day.

The notions of operant versus respondent conditioning have been around for 60 or 70 years now and people still can't tell the difference? Learning is a vacuous concept that you can talk to your grandmother about but science has moved away from it because it doesn't address precisely what is learned or precisely when the learning takes place.

Learning is a vacuous concept that you can talk to your grandmother about but science has moved away from it because it doesn't address precisely what is learned or precisely when the learning takes place.

So let me see if I understand you: Science has abandoned the concept of learning because it doesn't adequately explain learning?

Actually, you've got it backwards. Operant and respondant conditioning are vacuous concepts that are at least 60 or 70 years old. They're lacking in explanatory power and have been shown false by almost every study of the processes of language learning ever. In fact, the method of teaching a foreign language based on good ol' BF Skinner's ideas about "learning" was the most spectacular failure that teaching has ever seen.

Anyone who has had to deal with cockroach buildups in an apartment or house would know that in order to prevent them from coming to your kitchen is to wipe it down really well, because once they start coming, it's damn near impossible to stop them. Once they find a hint of food in a certain location, they will continue to look for it in the same location...

I'm pretty sure a sip of coffee would kill the cockroach.
"Caffeine is found in varying quantities in the beans, leaves, and fruit of over 60 plants, where it acts as a natural pesticide that paralyzes and kills certain insects feeding on the plants. It is most commonly consumed by humans in infusions extracted from the beans of the coffee plant and the leaves of the tea bush, as well as from various foods and drinks containing products derived from the kola nut or from cacao. Other sources include yerba mate, guarana berries, and the Yaupon Holly." -- wikipedia

An alternative method involves covering the outside of the jar with scotch tape or packing tape in order to give sufficient traction for cockroaches to climb into the jar without the requirement of placement next to a wall.

Funny, I lived in a place once where I had to set my drink in the center of a square made from tape turned sticky-side-up just to go to the bathroom.
The little bastards learned that a stovetop burner would kill them so they started climbing up the wall & onto the ceiling above th

Have they forgotten that cockroaches exist in all parts of the world !? What about testing cockroaches from Asia/Australia side of the planet where it is day when it is night in the USA. Why are these studies so incomplete and pedantic without thorough analysis ?

I would hope the cockroaches adjust to the timezone they're in.
They're probably noctournal wherever they are - So the timezone wouldn't really matter.
Bring' em over here from austraila and we'll test them when they've got Jet Lag.

If there's a nuclear winter, and cockroaches (which are generally said to survive despite radiation) are left in the dark (somewhere), will the darkness help them evolve to the point of being sentient?

Maybe some experiments aka "learning during darkness" should be conducted on ISS. hmm..*wondering about that ep of Justice League when Vandal Savage was the only human left on Earth. Cockroaches evolved and became big. With the red sun (less sunlight), they appeared to be more organised and smarter. Maybe the

If there's a nuclear winter, and cockroaches (which are generally said to survive despite radiation) are left in the dark (somewhere), will the darkness help them evolve to the point of being sentient?

You seem to be implying that they aren't already sentient. Anyone who has dealt with cockroaches before knows damn well they are!

Thanks, it's not very easy to read but I found some interesting bits around page 10. They also seem to have done their testing with people whose sleep schedules were disrupted - either deprived of sleep or just had different sleep patterns for testing.

Back in my college days, there was a nasty area right across the boulevard from Monterrey Tech (in Mexico) unaffectionately known as The Bronx. During weekends, it wasn't uncommon to see a molotov cocktail hurled here and there, from four or five story apartment buildings, just for the hell of it. There would be a towable hot dog stand parked on the curb, suddenly you'd hear a perpetrator from above yell "MOLOTOV!", the hot dog vendor would yell back "FUCK YOU!", then a molotov cocktail would fly in a parabola right above customers' heads and burst into flames in an empty lot across the street. Some of the customers would smile or laugh, some would groan in exasperation - but nobody was shocked.

Sanitation in the area was a disaster, there were so many cockroaches in the buildings that many students simply gave up trying to exterminate them and simply accepted them as "pets", going as far as wagering on cockroach races. I don't know if it still exists, but back in those days there was a cheap repellent stick known as Chinese Chalk that was smeared on surfaces, and while it was fresh, supposedly no cockroach would cross the boundary. Racecourses were designed with Chinese Chalk, beers were popped open, wages were placed on the floor, and the festivities began.

Years later, simply mentioning The Bronx can still make ex-alumni shudder.

Aw, what the hell, here's another good cockroach story:

One day, a friend of mine saw to his horror, three cockroaches huddling in his kitchen wall. So the guy approached nervously with a can of Raid and, involuntarily shutting his eyes, blasted 'em for about ten seconds before jumping several feet back. With morbid fascination and never taking his eyes off them, the guy slowly approached the dying, quivering roaches, still attached to the wall. He was just a couple of feet away when two of the roaches, in a final, heroic act of revenge, lunged at him. Screaming bloody murder in a high pitched tone that must've cracked a neighborhood window or two, the guy jerked violently, tripped and fell in a weird position, dislocating his shoulder.On a happy note, my friend himself tells that story, and has a good laugh while doing so.